In the red-carpeted front room, which felt like a room where you’d go to kiss your grandfather on the cheek after being freshly released from prison, large family-style gatherings of drinkers in Louis XVI—style chairs ate and smoked and shouted and pounded each other on the back around tables swagged with metallic gold fabric.

Donna Tartt -- The Goldfinch

When Louis XVI. was going to light out of the Tooleries a servant-girl done it.

Mark Twain -- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Oh, I would rather mount the scaffold of my brother, Louis XVI.

Alexandre Dumas -- The Count of Monte Cristo

The nobles in Louis XVI.

Harriet Beecher Stowe -- Uncle Tom’s Cabin

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Squinting at his surroundings he saw a plush Renaissance bedroom with Louis XVI furniture, hand-frescoed walls, and a colossal mahogany four-poster bed.

Dan Brown -- The Da Vinci Code

And I," continued Pierre, "shot Dolokhov because I considered myself injured, and Louis XVI was executed because they considered him a criminal, and a year later they executed those who executed him—also for some reason.

Leo Tolstoy -- War and Peace

Why did Louis XVI. of France, at his own personal expense, fit out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town some score or two of families from our own island of Nantucket?

Herman Melville -- Moby Dick

As long as he has for refrain nothing but la Carmagnole, he only overthrows Louis XVI.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

, in Saint-Sulpice: volutes, knots of ribbon, clouds, vermicelli and chiccory leaves, all in stone;—the Paris of Louis XVI.

Victor Hugo -- The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Beheaded in 1793 for daring to defend Louis XVI and oppose Robespierre.

Jostein Gaarder -- Sophie’s World

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They beheaded their monarchs—King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette—and declared war on England, Spain, and Holland.

Laurie Halse Anderson -- Fever, 1793

It was a trial to rank with all the great trials in history—Charles I before the HighCourt of Justice, Louis XVI before the French Convention, and Warren Hastings before the House of Lords.

John F. Kennedy -- Profiles in Courage

Alas! there was nothing now but flats decorated in the Louis XVI style, all white paint, with hortensias in blue enamel.

Marcel Proust -- Swann’s Way

In 1785 the Count de La Pérouse and his subordinate, Captain de Langle, were sent by King Louis XVI of France on a voyage to circumnavigate the globe.

Jules Verne -- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

ONE OF THE RARE OCCASIONS when the three American commissioners did anything together was the day of Adams’s presentation to Louis XVI, on May 8, 1778.

David McCullough -- John Adams

I drag the Louis XVI settee to rest before the window and think to remove my shoes before stepping onto her pink and green silk upholstery, my dress held high around my thighs, and I awkwardly squeeze myself into the open frame, looking down between my feet at the looming darkness.

Stephen King -- Rose Red

Scarcely two years after the Declaration of Independence Franklin was instructed by Congress, on his appointment as minister to France, to employ "the language of the United States," not simply English, in all his "replies or answers" to the communications of the ministry of Louis XVI.

Henry L. Mencken -- The American Language

On the platform of the octagonal tower of the Hotel de Cluny, the little shed of boards, which had served as an observatory to Messier, the naval astronomer under Louis XVI.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

ON SEPTEMBER 14, 1778, at Philadelphia, Congress named Benjamin Franklin minister plenipotentiary to the Court of Louis XVI.

David McCullough -- John Adams

The cemetery of the Madeleine, a terrible pauper’s grave in 1793, was covered with jasper and marble, since the bones of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette lay in that dust.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

At City Tavern and the London Coffee House toasts were now commonly raised to His Most Christian Majesty, young King Louis XVI of France, and to "a speedy alliance" between France and the United States.

David McCullough -- John Adams

From the time that news of the surrender at Saratoga first reached Paris, in December 1777, Franklin had found himself the center of attentions not just from the Court of His Most Christian Majesty Louis XVI, but from the British as well.

David McCullough -- John Adams

She talked a great deal of M. de Miromesnil, Keeper of the Seals under Louis XVI. and of a Presidentess Duplat, with whom she had been very intimate.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

Others are so blasphemous as to compare the scaffold of Louis XVI. to the cross of Jesus Christ.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

Louis XVI. was merely a king.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

M. Gillenormand’s attire was not the habit of Louis XIV. nor yet that of Louis XVI.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

Neither the Convention, nor the death of Louis XVI.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

At the age of four and twenty, in ’93, being then M. de Chartres, he had witnessed, from the depth of a box, the trial of Louis XVI.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

"He had the appearance of a strong constitution," Adams would write of the twenty-four-year-old Louis XVI, who was indeed kindhearted and robust, if painfully nearsighted and awkward, and who had it in his power to determine the fate of the United States of America.

David McCullough -- John Adams

As intended, it was one of the grandest occasions of the reign of Louis XVI and his Queen, and the four Adamses and Thomas Jefferson, along with everyone of fashion in Paris, were in attendance.

David McCullough -- John Adams

I wish WE’D a had the handling of Louis XVI.

Mark Twain -- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

To this question historians reply that Louis XIV’s activity, contrary to the program, reacted on Louis XVI.

Leo Tolstoy -- War and Peace

But why did it not react on Louis XIV or on Louis XV—why should it react just on Louis XVI?

Leo Tolstoy -- War and Peace

These were eaten by the light of a tallow candle or of a lamp of the time of Louis XVI.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

No; no more than Louis XVI.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

THE EXTREME EDGE There is a divine right in Louis XVI.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

I am composed, I am a man, I witnessed the death of Louis XVI.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

Louis XVI, stripped of all power, was to go on trial for treason.

David McCullough -- John Adams

No sooner was he home than the news arrived that on January 21, Louis XVI had been beheaded.

David McCullough -- John Adams

Jefferson, who had once called Louis XVI "a good man," "an honest man," observed privately that monarchs were "amenable to punishment like other criminals."

David McCullough -- John Adams

Adams never doubted that faces carried clues to character: the whiteas-paper pallor of Condorcet bespoke dedication to hard study; the eyes of Voltaire with their "fine frenzy rolling" were the eyes of a poet; in the face of Louis XVI, Adams had seen "goodness and innocence" as clearly as he saw "keenness, and wildness and softness" in the eyes of young Jones.

David McCullough -- John Adams

—THE GRANDFATHER AND THE GRANDSON About 1817, he invariably passed two afternoons a week in a house in his own neighborhood, in the Rue Ferou, with Madame la Baronne de T., a worthy and respectable person, whose husband had been Ambassador of France to Berlin under Louis XVI.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

It was on this occasion that she let out to Swann what she really thought of his abode on the Quai d’Orleans; he having ventured the criticism that her friend had indulged, not in the Louis XVI style, for, he went on, although that was not, of course, done, still it might be made charming, but in the ’Sham-Antique.’

Marcel Proust -- Swann’s Way

If the conditions under which power is entrusted consist in the wealth, freedom, and enlightenment of the people, how is it that Louis XIV and Ivan the Terrible end their reigns tranquilly, while Louis XVI and Charles I are executed by their people?

Leo Tolstoy -- War and Peace

…upon the half-opened shutters would throw down to the foot of my bed its enchanted ladder; where I would fall asleep, as it might be in the open air, like a titmouse which the breeze keeps poised in the focus of a sunbeam—or sometimes the Louis XVI room, so cheerful that I could never feel really unhappy, even on my first night in it: that room where the slender columns which lightly supported its ceiling would part, ever so gracefully, to indicate where the bed was and to keep it…

Marcel Proust -- Swann’s Way

Meanwhile Monte Cristo had rapidly taken off his great-coat, waistcoat, and shirt, and one might distinguish by the glimmering through the open panel that he wore a pliant tunic of steel mail, of which the last in France, where daggers are no longer dreaded, was worn by King Louis XVI.

Alexandre Dumas -- The Count of Monte Cristo

…of the idea, the vast storm of the Assembly-Tribunal, the public wrath interrogating, Capet not knowing what to reply, the alarming, stupefied vacillation by that royal head beneath that sombre breath, the relative innocence of all in that catastrophe, of those who condemned as well as of the man condemned,—he had looked on those things, he had contemplated that giddiness; he had seen the centuries appear before the bar of the Assembly-Convention; he had beheld, behind Louis XVI.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

The member of the Convention resumed:— "So far as Louis XVI. was concerned, I said ’no.

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

"Louis XVI was executed because they said he was dishonorable and a criminal," came into Pierre’s head, "and from their point of view they were right, as were those too who canonized him and died a martyr’s death for his sake.

Leo Tolstoy -- War and Peace

They were the actual military orders given by France’s Minister of the Navy to Commander La Pérouse, with notes along the margin in the handwriting of King Louis XVI!